A semiconductor DRAM is typically comprised of parallel pairs of bitlines crossing wordlines. A charge storage cell is located adjacent intersections of the bitlines and wordlines, each cell being comprised of a charge storage capacitor connected for access to a bitline through a cell access field effect transistor (FET), which FET is enabled from a wordline. Each bitline pair is connected to a sense amplifier, which is connected via an access transistor, enabled by a Y-decoder, to a databus. The databuses are located on the chip in parallel to the wordlines and parallel to a strip of associated sense amplifiers, and orthogonal to the bitlines. Read and write amplifiers are connected to the databuses.
As the capacity of DRAMs increases, it becomes increasingly important to minimize the size of the chip in which it is integrated, in order to increase yields and to decrease the cost per bit of the DRAMS.